Merchants spend time, effort, and money tracking the preferences and behaviors of potential, current, and former customers. The global CRM (Consumer Relationship Management) industry offers a range of approaches to help merchants track and optimize sales, marketing, and after-sales touch points with customers. Tracking which products a potential or current customer is considering and which products a customer ultimately purchases is a critical component of most CRM programs, such as to deploy and track effectiveness of marketing campaigns that seek to move the customer between those two points on the customer journey.
In online environments, automatically tracking an individual customer's interest in a specific product has been accomplished by using web cookies to track product web pages or product images viewed by that customer. This data is often used to re-target a customer with product specific marketing messages or advertisements in an attempt to convert consideration for a product into a purchase.
In offline environments, such as a retail establishment, tracking a customer's purchase history is common for CRM purposes. However, there is currently no efficient method for tracking a customer's offline interaction with specific products before the point of sale. These interactions, such as touching or holding a product inside or near merchandise display areas or trying a product in a product fitting room, hold value as an indicator of customer interest in a particular product. Mobile applications (apps) exist that track items with barcodes that are physically scanned by customers with their smartphones; however, inconsistent or infrequent use of these apps by customers renders them ineffective for CRM purposes. There is a need for a tracking method that requires limited or no action from the customer, other than natural shopping behavior at the retail establishment. Further, there is a need for a tracking method that automatically associates the offline product interactions with specific customers in an online CRM system.